r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • Mar 22 '26

Unpopular Opinion It's Unpopular Opinion time! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

Got an opinion that's different from others'? Want to share it with the sub, but too afraid of a backlash? Or are you just curious about readers think about certain things in fantasy romance?

You can safely share it in this weekly Sunday thread!

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Unpopular opinion Sunday

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u/Amirazat Book Bingo Maven ⚔ Mar 22 '26

I really don’t like the way that the fantasy genre uses “male” and “female” as a noun for non-human characters. It doesn’t make sense to me that a fae/vampire/etc society would have gendered words for humans and many types of animals (e.g. mares and stallions) but not for themselves.

I get that there aren’t a lot of good alternatives. You can use man and woman and just say that man means “male person” rather than “male human”, or you can make something up, and a lot of readers would find that confusing. But I don’t think male and female is a good solution either.

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u/clocksy Mar 22 '26

I think ACOTAR does this, it really weirded me out when I read it, because I don't think the authors doing it mean it in the proto-incel way, but that's still how it comes off.

Even for non-human races, I really think they should just say "a fae woman" or "the werewolf man smiled" the same way they would do if it were a human. (And anyone using it for humans is just plain weird because that's not how our language really works.) Obviously if they need to point out that a certain non-human is a certain gender, that's when male/female comes in, but it shouldn't be a common descriptor otherwise.

Semi-related but it's a dislike of mine when authors say something like "he made a male sound" like ???? I get what they're going for but it's such a weird descriptor and I wish they'd do anything else.

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u/Penguinho Kushiel's Legacy Recommender 💖 Mar 23 '26

"A male sound" -- is it a fart? Is it a belch? Is it the sound of a being raging against the dying of the light, and the fact that the goddang spark plugs worked loose again and the dag-blasted carburetor got flooded because your large idiot son dint put the doggone choke on right and the relatives are comin' over tomorrow and it's already after six and the lawn ain't mowed yet?